This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads has just two pointers. First, a new volunteer web service to report problems with websites, which may be useful for not only our own sites but for the sites our patrons visit. Second, a nine-minute video that illustrates the reuse of themes and ideas in …

I just got the bill for the first month of hosting this blog on Amazon Web Services. The total for the month was $23.60, and includes:

• data transfer charges for all in-bound and out-bound content;
• a full-time use of a LINUX micro-sized Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance (with backup …

This week of DLTJ Thursday Threads covers a wide range of topics. First, from a public policy perspective, is news that the U.S. Senate has a bill proposing the study of an internet "kill-switch" that some are speculating could behave like what happened in Egypt last week. Next, from …

This week Amazon takes center stage of DLTJ Thursday Threads with a report of their new Kindle Singles program for medium-form digital content and a screen-reader-aware version of the Kindle reader application for PCs. After that is a look at how scholarly discourse is changing -- radically! -- with the availability and …

Late last year I was asked to put together a 20-minute presentation for my employer (LYRASIS) on what I saw as upcoming technology milestones that could impact member libraries. It was a good piece, so I thought I'd share what I learned with others as well. The discussion was in …

It wasn't too long ago that the music industry was in an uproar about stories of how easy it was to copy digital audio files and make digital copies with high fidelity. It was predicted that we would see the same thing in other media forms, and this week's DLTJ …

It has been the longest of weeks and the shortest of weeks. Longest because of a working weekend with the ALA Midwinter conference in San Diego. Shortest because the activities leading up to, during, and after the conference didn't leave much time for reading items to prepare a DLTJ Thursday …

On Sunday evening, the OCLC Innovation Lab held a public demonstration of a project with the working title, A Web Presence for Small Libraries It is a templated website that could serve as a library's barest bones presence on the web. The target audience is small and/or rural libraries …

A last-minute change to my plans for ALA Midwinter came on Tuesday when I was sought out to fill in for a speaker than canceled at the ALCTS Digital Preservation Interest Group meeting. Options for outsourcing storage and services for preserving digital content has been a recent interest, so I …

The turn of the year brings commentary on the past 12 months and thoughts on the future. This edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the relationship between libraries and electronic books with an offer by Sony to explain e-reader hardware to libraries and an opinion piece that libraries need …

The end-of-year holidays are behind us and (in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere) the cold days of winter in front of us. What better time to bag it all and head to the warm(er) temperatures of San Diego, California for the ALA Midwinter meeting. I mean -- come'on …

With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher's view of Amazon's strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon's Mechanical Turk drives …

DLTJ is in a bit of flux now. After updating some underlying packages on my 9-year-old Gentoo-based personal server, I'm finding that I can't start the web server process without the 1-minute load average climbing to roughly 60 in the span of about 5 minutes. (Translation: the machine is …

When I say "<blank> is a question answering system. A question can be posed in natural language and ... <blank> can come up with a very precise answer to that question" -- what comes to mind to fill in the <blank>? If you guessed a system developed by IBM to appear alongside …

I'm trying an experiment over the next couple days/weeks. I'm turning off the reCAPTCHA requirement for blog commenters (the figure-out-these-words-and-type-them-in anti-spam scheme I turned on three and a half years ago). The only automated scheme in place now is Akismet. This change was made Friday night, and over the …

I was reading a story last week about the Linux Foundation's third annual report [PDF] of the Linux kernel, and in it was a section that talked about the affiliation of the programmers that contributed to the development of the kernel. This got me thinking about the affiliation of …

This week's Thursday Threads highlights includes two legal cases that bear watching. The first is the case of SkyRiver/Innovative Interfaces versus OCLC (covered on DLTJ previously); now that the case has been moved to OCLC's home court (the federal district court located in Columbus, OH), it is asking for …

I'm pleased to announce that the Fall 2010 issue of NISO's International Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is done and available online to NISO members and ISQ subscribers. Print copies are scheduled to be mailed on December 28th. The individual issue is available for purchase (see the form link to on …

It has been another busy week, and unfortunately Thursday has slipped into Friday. There have been a few updates to earlier Thursday Threads items, so I'm turning this into "Friday Followups" instead. We'll attempt to get back new items next Thursday, but in the meantime take a look at these …

The highlights of the past week are around publishing -- first with a model proposed by Eric Hellman in which consumers can pool enough money to pay publishers to "set a book free" under a Creative Commons license, then with an announcement by the University of Pittsburgh offering free hosting of …